The Viking Company — Sergiu Vataman, AI Engineer

A one-page portfolio site for The Viking Company (Sergiu Vataman), positioning the brand as AI engineering — autonomous agents, custom skills, tooling, and RAG systems. Redesigned from the original WordPress site (thevikingcompany.eu) in the Hermes Agent / Nous Research "engraved parchment" aesthetic (hermes-agent.nousresearch.com).

Stack

Built with the same framework as the Hermes Agent site:

• Next.js 15 (App Router) — statically exported (output: "export"), no server required
• TypeScript
• Fonts: EB Garamond (display serif) + IBM Plex Mono (mono), self-hosted via next/font
• Styling: hand-written CSS with the Hermes design tokens (no UI framework), in app/globals.css
• Imagery: public-domain Viking paintings turned into ink-on-parchment engravings with the hermes-mythic-design skill

Run it

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:3000
npm run build    # static export → ./out

Deploy the out/ directory to any static host (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, S3, etc.). No backend is needed — the contact path is a mailto: plus social links.

Where the content lives

What	Where
Projects, expertise cards, social links, email	lib/data.ts
Hero headline / copy	components/Hero.tsx
About bio + values	components/About.tsx
Section copy	the matching components/*.tsx
Colors, type, spacing, responsive rules	app/globals.css (:root tokens at the top)

Imagery (the engravings)

The engraved WebP images are committed in public/img/ — no extra steps needed to run the site.

They were produced from public-domain Wikimedia paintings with the hermes-mythic-design skill (maintained in its own repo). The recipe, for reference:

# hero background (faded toward the text side)
python engrave.py moran-armada.jpg hero-armada.png \
  --style hatch --period 8 --contrast 1.45 --background --fade-direction left

# about plate
python engrave.py krohg-leiv.jpg about-leiv.png \
  --style hatch --period 7 --contrast 1.4

Outputs are then resized + converted to WebP for delivery. Source paintings used:

• Edward Moran — Viking Armada → hero
• Christian Krohg — Leiv Eiriksson Discovers America (1893) → about plate + contact backdrop
• (also downloaded: Roerich Guests from Overseas, Dicksee Funeral of a Viking)

Skill improvement

The hermes-mythic-design skill's engrave.py was extended with a --gamma tone-curve option: --gamma 0.5–0.8 lifts shadows on dark/night photos so they stop blocking up into solid ink (cleaner than just lowering --contrast); --gamma 1.2–1.6 deepens a washed-out image. The skill lives at github.com/NylasDev/hermes-mythic-design.

The Work section

Projects are grouped into three tiers in lib/data.ts (edit copy/links there):

1. Public-Sector & High-Stakes Systems — e-Licitație (SEAP/SICAP) national procurement, e-Tarif Giurgiu bridge tolling, and internal taxation systems (the last shown as "Confidential · NDA", no link).
2. Client Platforms & Products — Bavaria Yachts Romania, Yacht One, Viking Bazar, Wheelmarket.
3. Open Source & Experiments — the GitHub repos.

Plus a soul-project strip for Nerva Orbital (YouTube), the youth passion project.

Notes / things to confirm

• Nerva Orbital description is intentionally generic — I couldn't determine what the channel actually contains, so the blurb in lib/data.ts (soulProject) avoids inventing specifics. Tell me what it is and I'll sharpen it.
• Public-sector wording in lib/data.ts says "engineering on" these systems rather than claiming sole authorship — adjust to match your exact role.
• Discord is the handle nylas_ (a copy-to-clipboard chip, not a link, since a username has no canonical profile URL). Rationale: a Discord username alone exposes nothing sensitive; the only downside is unsolicited DMs.
• The original blog/"Newsroom" section was dropped in favour of a project/work focus; re-add a section if you want to publish articles.